Welcome back again. As you can see, we are starting to populate the site with new content. There are few new writers and contributors waiting in the wings with new content. If you are interested in contributing, just contact me using the contact form.

As for what’s going on around here, I’ve got a couple of interesting conventions to tell you about.

First, GaMExpo is coming up next week. That’s November 3-5, 2017. It’s going to be at the Hilton on Westover Hills here in San Antonio. I’m working the convention, so if you are attending, please track me down or drop me a line. GaMExpo is a board, RPG, and video gaming convention. It is partnering with another convention this year, so the attendance should be interesting, and if you also enjoy Anime, you should not miss it. I’m excited to be involved again with one of my hobbies (board gaming). While in law school, it took a way way way back burner, so I’m happy to have the time again to devote to the convention.

I also took my son, known on this site as Nick the Gamer, last weekend to a local convention put on by his school district (NISD) called Nerdvana Con. He had a blast. We listened to some young adult authors talk about their journeys. We also went to a talk by one of my friends who also organizes the above mentioned GaMExpo about creating You Tube shows (he co-hosts Geek Out SA with his wife, which you can check out here). Finally, he got to play Dungeons and Dragons for the first time, which he loved. I’m really impressed with the school district for putting something like this together. The only complaint I had was that there was too much going on during each time slot and choices were hard to make at times. That might have been avoided by making the convention a few hours longer (it ended at 3 PM).

As for me, besides plugging away at this site, I’m prepping for what might actually be my first trial. I can’t talk about details of my work much, but I can say I am very much enjoying the work and learning a great deal. I’m also doing decent with my Fantasy Football league for the first time ever, which is a new feeling. Let’s hope it keeps up!

Welcome back to Killer Betties! It’s been over three years since I’ve made a post, but I am back. Before I get to what I’ve been doing for three years, I want to talk first about The Walking Dead’s season premiere.

I’m excited The Walking Dead is back. I was a tad bit disappointed in tonight. Sure, there were a lot of explosions and people dying. It’s great the gang’s all back together and we got to see our leaders lead and our killers kill. Negan also didn’t disappoint. His amusement at seeing Rick and the gang was worth the episode. But I didn’t really care for how the episode ended. I was hoping for a bit more closure. And the previews for the coming season make me think the entire seasons is going to involve the next few days IRL for the characters. I’m thinking we aren’t going to get to the next step of ‘what happens now that Negan’s gone’ until the seasons is over. I’m sure it will be a great journey, but I’m ready for the next thing and a whole season more of this conflict of Negan and only days passing may frustrate me. Check back as I post these blog posts to find out if that changes. Also … did anyone else catch the time trouble of Rick’s daughter? Maggie is not even showing in her pregnancy yet, but Rick’s daughter has gone from infant to toddler overnight. WTH?

Now that that’s out of my system 🙂 Where have I been? Well, I decided to pursue yet another career and went to law school. 3 years of law school took every spare moment of my life that wasn’t devoted to my children and husband. It even took some of those devoted moments too. Law school was a lot, but I did well and succeeded. I took the bar in February, a little early but there was no reason for me not to. I got my results on May 1 (spoiler: I passed) and graduated from law school on May 20. I became a licensed attorney on June 1. I was hired by the DA’s office here a week later. And I’ve been working as a juvenile prosecutor since. I love it, and one of the things I love is that I’m finally adjusting to the fact that I have free time again! Which is why I’m back to writing and getting this site going again.

Over the coming months, I hope to have regular features and content posted. My youngest, who is 11, wrote the review for Football Manager 2017 and I couldn’t be prouder. He’s also going to have a regular feature where he lists his five favorite You Tube videos of the last week, since he’s an avid lover of You Tube. I have some writers expressing interest and will hopefully be posting content on the regular.

If you are interested in contributing to the rebirth of the site, please contact me.

Football Manager 2017 is a football management simulation video game for the PC developed by Sports Interactive and published by Sega.Gameplay: In terms of gameplay, it is really fun. You can create your own tactics, buy and sell players, and play some soccer games. The most important part of gameplay is the tactics because if you have good tactics, you will most likely win the game. If you don’t, you are going to struggle. The interface is really easy to learn and navigate. It also tells you important info about your job security, how much money the club has, what division and position the club is in, among other things. The most important things on the interface are Tactics, Scouting and Board. Scouting is really helpful if you want to make some new signings. Your scouts go to every place in the world to try to find some talent good for the squad. The board is where the job security is. Job security tells you how secure your job is and the pros and cons of your management. You can make requests for a bigger transfer budgets, stadiums, and youth facilities.

There are many features like Create-A-Club, Online Career and Challenges. In Create-A-Club, you create your own club, and try to lead it to glory. You can create the badge, kits, name and more. In Online Career, you create or join a server, and face up against a manager. You can compete for glory or you can just have a fun time playing the game. In Challenges, you try to complete challenges pre-determined by the game. My favorites are The Savior Cometh (in which you have to save a team from losing their division (relegation)), The Invincibles (where you have to go the rest of the season unbeaten) and You can’t win anything with kids (in which you have to try to win trophies with young players). 10/10

Graphics: The graphics are 3D models that aren’t bad but they aren’t great either. The pitch and other stadium features are spot on. 7/10

Replayabilty: The game can go on forever. The game doesn’t end unless you retire. This means that you can do challenges set by yourself, manage some of the best clubs for a long time or get an international team to the World Cup. You can go on for 500 years and still be managing Liverpool. 10/10

Music: There is none and the only sound there is in the game is the crowd, but that’s optional. ?/10

Conclusion: All in all, the game is amazing and I recommend that you try it if you like soccer. Even if you’re not good at first, you can watch tutorial videos, listen to the tips the game gives you, and have a really fun experience. With the gameplay, interface, and replayabilty values, I want to give this game a 10/10 but the 3D models aren’t that good and there’s no music, so it earns a 9 out of 10.

Killer Betties is making plans to come back from the dead. If you have any interest in writing video game reviews, previews, interviews or editorials, please shoot me an email at staci (at) killerbetties.com or submit feedback and tell me about yourself. We don’t have gender requirements for our writers, so guys AND gals, please apply!

Every Thursday night, I go to Gamelot in San Antonio and play board games with some of the coolest cats around. This article will give a quick update on the games I played and what I thought of them. They are ranked in the order of enjoyment with #1 being my favorite from that night.

1. Among the Stars Among the Stars is a relatively new game that was released in 2012. It’s a ship building card game in which players earn victory points by placing cards in front of them. Each card does something different and some have requirements or victory point bonuses if certain conditions are met. All cards have a cost requirement and money is not unlimited, so there’s a strategy in how to spend and when to discard for extra money. It’s a very fun game and I’m not just saying that because I smoked everyone else. My strategy involved trying to get as many of the objective bonus cards as possible and taking very high point cards that gave immediate points. I also chose a character that allowed me to replace special cards with the unused special cards, in order to maximize my points or remove a card my hand if I thought it would benefit someone else too much. I didn’t go for many of the cards that gave points at the end. In fact, I only got 10 bonus points, where as the person who came in second had 22 at the end, and he still couldn’t catch me. Take the lead early and build on it as quickly as possible was my strategy and it paid off well. It was my favorite game of the night.

2. Elder Sign Elder Sign is a cooperative dice rolling game in which players work together to defeat a big, bad, evil monster that is dead set on devouring the world. Players have to defeat the monster by collecting a certain number of Elder Signs, awarded as rewards for completing quests, before the monster reaches the end of their Doom Track. Each player chooses a character with a special ability. I chose Amanda Sharpe. Her ability involves being able to complete as many tasks as she wants without having to reroll the dice. This is a useful ability when quests come up that have a lot of separate tasks but not many dice are needed for each task. In our play through of the game, though, I didn’t get to use it that much. We played a three player game and drew Azazoth as our big baddie. Early on, he got a lot of doom tokens and we had very few Elder Signs, so it didn’t look good for us, but then we had Rlyeh come out (which is worth a lot of Elder signs), and we ended up defeating the beast. Elder Sign was released in 2011, so it has some age on it, but still feels fresh and new for anyone who hasn’t played it much. I really love this game and the only reason it wasn’t my favorite play of the night was because I have some familiarity with it and Among the Stars was brand new to me (and I won Among the Stars…)

3. Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga Fire & Axe, released in 2004, allows players to become vikings in a quest for victory points. Players do this by trading, placing settlers, and raiding cities throughout Europe. The whole objective of the game is to complete Saga cards. These randomly come out of a Saga card deck (split into three eras) and have some kind of goal on them, such as settling certain groups of cities (or a lone distant city) or trading with a city. The game ends when all the Saga cards are drawn (after three rounds) or all the Saga cards are claimed (thus immediately ending the game.) The interesting thing with these goals is that only the last goal in a group counts, so a player can be working on a goal, such as settling three cities, and get two settled with their pieces only to have another player swoop in and settle the last city, claiming the Saga. Some of the Saga cards had bonus points, but most of the victory points come from points immediately earned for trading with a city, points gained by raiding towns (with tokens on them), and points accumulated for settling. There were some interesting bonus point rules that made the game more complicated and was often hard to keep track of. In the end, I came in third, and that was only because I managed to steal a couple of Sagas with high bonus points on them out from under the leader, who really killed the rest of us at the end. Of course, he was also the only one who had played before. I didn’t really enjoy this game as much as the other two and given the choice, there are a lot of other games I’d rather play.

Do you agree or disagree with my opinions of these games? Please leave comments and let me know your thoughts! Do you have a game you would like me to play and give my thoughts on? Please let me know that as well. Thanks for reading!

Today, we officially launched our YouTube channel with the release of the first Killer Bits episode. Killer Bits will be short videos that talk about some aspect of the board gaming space, covering everything from news, reviews, and previews, to opinions and recaps. There is much more planned for the YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe after you watch this video! Can you guess the card game before we tell you what it is?

Minecraft is a very popular game today with more than 20 million registered users. Everyday that number grows by about ten thousand. The most likely reason the game has grown big so quickly is that it pretty much breaks every “rule” a normal game has. There are no missions. You are set in a world where you can do whatever you like. Climb hilltops, dig tunnels underground, or build a nice house by the water. Everything is up to you – the player.

One thing that also sets Minecraft apart from other new games is its graphics. Some would say they are terrible while others would say it’s terrific because of its nostalgic old school look. Each and every texture in the game has a pixeled surface to it which really brings back memories of games like Super Mario and so forth. In case you are not that fond of this old school graphics, there are texture packages that will modify the way the game looks to your liking.

Minecraft can be played in single player mode or together with others online. Today, there are thousands of different Minecraft servers to choose from and sometimes it can be hard to figure out which to pick. A solution for that would be visiting MinePick Servers List. There you can find many different servers to choose from and each server has a description you can read to get a better understanding of what it is about. All servers in the server list are ranked based on how many votes they have. This is to make sure only the most popular ones are listed in the top and are the ones you will notice at first.

This is a great game to play together with your friends. Everything really comes down to teamwork while playing and it’s very rare to feel any anger or frustration, as you may feel in other games, because in Minecraft there’s usually no hurry to achieve something or get to some place. Everything can be done at your own pace.

All you need to be able to play on different Minecraft servers is a copy of the game. It’s purchased over at Minecraft’s own official website. It costs as little as 19.95 euro or $26.95 US and all updates are free. There is no monthly fee. There will most likely be no sequels of the game, meaning for that little money you will have a Minecraft account for all eternity.

The year was 1989. I was just entering tenth grade. Most of my friends were boys. They made relentless fun of the New Kids on the Block and listened to hair metal. As a result, I completely missed out on crushing on Jordan or Donnie (were those the ones people crushed on?) Instead, I wanted to have babies with Joe Perry (of Aerosmith) and my room was littered with pictures of Lita Ford and Jon Bon Jovi. I honestly don’t feel like I missed out on much.

Flash forward twenty-three years. I went to the Half-Price Books down the street and picked up a grab bag of comic books for three bucks for my boys. I’m trying to get them started right. The front showed an old Batman comic and the back revealed Ninja High School, which sounds like an awesome comic. And school. I picked the boys (who are six and nine) up from their own school and showed them the treasure. There were ten comics just waiting to be discovered inside this beautiful, and cheap, grab bag. So we cracked it open and started divvying the comics up.

Stuck between two copies of X Factor, I found this:

My kids said things like “what’s this?” and “is it cool?”

The first I could answer. New Kids on the Block were a popular boy band from the late eighties and early nineties. Mark Wahlberg’s older brother was in the band. This must have been a comic that banked on the popularity of the band.

The second question was harder. Was this a cool comic? I started thumbing threw it, trying to remember what I could about the band I barely paid any attention to. They had some songs I thought I knew and a quick google search turned up gems like Hangin’ Tough and The Right Stuff. Seriously, go watch that video, especially if you loved them when you were a kid, and tell me it’s not one of the funniest things you’ve seen today.

The comic itself has gems like “Yeah! Hang tough, and as long as you love us … We’ll be loving you forever!” and a section called “New Kids on the Rag.” I’m just not sure what they meant by that, but in that section, it says “Hey Look! It’s the new fags on the block. What a bunch of poseurs!” The comic seems to outline their rise to fame, but there’s a mocking undertone to it, so I’m not sure if it’s cool or not.

I’m putting the comic in my own collection. Even though I wasn’t a fan of the group and I can’t figure out the point of the comic, it’s still something that does make me remember my childhood. The part where I made fun of anything that was cool and popular and mainstream. Funny how things don’t change.

Were you a fan of NKotB? Were you like me, and too cool for them? Or are you eighteen years old and have no idea who New Kids on the Block are. Oh God, I’m old.